What's in a Name?

As a blog about DC history, we of course worked hard to seek out the most obscure pseudonym this city has witnessed in her over 200 year history. We settled on The Ten Miles Square, which is one of the epithets the city's namesake applied to the new capital in his letters. Outside of being a cool name for the city used by George Washington, The Ten Miles Square is also a convenient reminder that the nation's founders carved out a tiny center of power in the middle of nowhere. When the city began, it was truly little more than an indistinguishable square in a marshy forest. A few things have changed since then...